


Grifter and Thief

by finnimbrand



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-22 06:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11374470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnimbrand/pseuds/finnimbrand
Summary: In the Leverage-verse, Natasha is a grifter and Clint is a thief.  This is how they first met.





	Grifter and Thief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kiwigirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiwigirl/gifts).



When he was hired to steal back a statue from a woman by the name of Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton took the job because of the value of the statue and the warm persuasiveness of Zora Marics, the woman who had originally owned the statue. The job itself didn't seem likely to take much effort.

There were only so many ways of removing something the size of a small loaf of bread from a high security building such as Zora Marics' headquarters. Clint figured out how the statue had been smuggled into a shipping container and then tracked the shipping container to a small building in a busy neighborhood near the center of the city.

The ground floor of the building was a restaurant that looked like it had been there many years; the rest of the building was rooms for rent. Clint entered the restaurant, and took a seat at the counter.

The restaurant was crowded with locals and enticing smells, and the menu was simple. Clint ordered a drink and then headed for the back, looking for the restrooms if anyone asked. He was also looking for a way up to the rest of the building.

He stopped when he saw Natasha. She was in the center of a crowd, throwing darts at the pips on playing cards tacked up on a dartboard. The people around her were laughing and cheering and handing her money.

Clint was intrigued. He had no idea this was the woman who'd stolen the statue; he had no idea what she was doing at all, though after she'd done it a few times, winning a few bets and losing a few strategically, he'd figured out that the card part of the combination was a trick. The darts, though -- that was all skill.

He hadn't quite figured out whether she was palming some of the cards or just using a trick shuffle by the time she turned to him and asked him to pick a card.

She had no idea what she was getting into, Clint thought, smiling genially as he placed his money on the table and picked a card and a set of darts.

They fought it out for half an hour, neither of them missing, until she threw down her perforated deck of cards and excused herself, promising to return with a new set of cards. Clint found himself the center of the attention of the crowd, and did a few trick shots before ducking through the crowd to resume his interrupted search.

As the crowd pressed against him, he found something more interesting. Several of the men in the crowd had identical guns concealed under their jackets.

Change of plan, Clint decided.

He found Natasha in the back room. "You been doing this often here?" he asked her, ignoring the fourth identical gun being pointed at him before he'd even made it through the door.

"Come in a close the door behind you," she said coolly, and when he had, she put away the gun so quickly he wasn't even sure where it had gone.

"What's going on here?" he asked her. 

She frisked him and found the three guns he'd stolen on impulse tucked into his belt like three uncomfortable ducklings in a row. 

"They're not mine, but they could be yours. Strange, huh?" Clint said.

"I've seen stranger," Natasha said, frowning a him like he was a puzzle, or an unfortunate number in her neatly scribed ledger. "You came to warn me?"

"I guess now you're going to say you didn't need warning," Clint said.

"No, I didn't need your warning," Natasha said. "But I appreciate it."

Clint gave a little bow.

"But tell me... Do you often steal guns from dangerous people?"

"Only when I'm in the mood for target practice," Clint said. "Then I can't help myself."

Natasha frowned more.

"Cheer up," Clint said. "At least you know you're not getting shot tonight."

"Not with these guns," Natasha said. "Why don't you go see if they're still there."

When Clint sauntered back out into the main part of the restaurant, he thought at first that the men had left, but then he saw the three of them conferring just outside the restaurant with three more men.

"If I were you, I'd get out of here," he told Natasha as he slid back into the back room. She was loading one of the guns he'd stolen with blanks. 

"That's exactly what I'm planning on doing," Natasha said. "I'm leaving forever. If you want to help, you can put these guns back where you found them."

Now it was Clint's turn to frown suspiciously at her, but he didn't see how guns filled with blanks could do much harm.

"When you see Zora, give her the statue and don't tell her that you helped me," Natasha said. "Trust me."

Then she sailed through the door and into the crowd, leaving Clint to wonder how she'd known he was after the statue.

But he didn't linger long wondering; he had a job to do. He substituted the guns with blanks in the holsters of the three arriving assassins, and then faded back to watch Natasha perform her act with the cards and the darts.

She found plenty of marks willing to wager their money, and Clint watched the assassins work the crowd, sending many of Natasha's prospects away with a quick word in their ear. 

One of them winked at him, and that was when he knew for sure that Zora Marics was involved in this.

But by then he was pretty sure that Natasha had the situation well in hand. He held hard to that certainty even when the guns came out. The shot, the screams, the blood -- it had to be fake, didn't it?

Natasha clutched her side and left a trail of blood behind her that ended at the river.

Clint watched it through to the end; the faces by flashlight, grim as they searched further and further downstream. The other faces peering out windows or turning away, looking and then looking away from something no one wanted to see.

When the night was silent, Clint climbed up the side of the building and found Natasha's rented room. He was in and out in two minutes and seventeen seconds.

A few days later, when Zora Marics came calling, he stubbornly denied everything. She wasn't getting that statue back from him.

He read an article about it in the paper, about the body dragged out of the river and the results of the autopsy, about how the dead woman had worked for Zora Marics, a shady businesswoman with connections to all the wrong people, and how nothing could be proved.

He had his own suspicions, putting together a story about a woman who was willing to fake her own death to get away from her past, but he thought he would probably never know the full story. 

He was wrong about that, too.

 

"Of course I didn't mess around with dead bodies," Natasha said to Steve. They'd just finished a job, and Clint had been telling the story of how he met Natasha, with Natasha looking on and smiling mysteriously at appropriate intervals. 

"Steve, I'm a grifter. I just charmed a clerk at the hospital to get the fake autopsy report filed, and then made sure the reporter from the paper talked to me about my neighbor who'd been shot, so I could be sure she got the details right."

"Death by paperwork," Clint said.

"It was fun."

"So how did you know how to find her when we needed a grifter for that first job?" Steve asked Clint.

"Oh, I'd been in touch with him by then," Natasha said airily.

"She'd hire me to steal something, and leave clues about her identity," Clint said. "Constantly changing clues."

"I didn't want to be _obvious_."

"I just thought you were confused," Clint said, teasing.

Natasha shrugged. "Zora taught me to be a grifter. Leaving her was ... hard. I wasn't sure where I'd end up. So ... you might have been right," she admitted. 

"The hell I was," Clint said. "If I'd really thought that, I would never have suggested you for the first job. Last thing we needed was an unreliable grifter. But by then, I knew that there were plenty of things you weren't confused about."

Natasha looked thoughtful.

"And I thought maybe you could use a little push into making a few decisions."

Natasha looked less thoughtful and more like she was contemplating the nature of brazen insolence.

"He's lucky I like where I ended up," she said to Steve.


End file.
